BLASTERMIND
Party on, dads
20 candy Love Hearts in merciless brain-teaser form.
RELEASED OUT NOW!
2020 | 12 | Blu-ray (4K/standard)/dvd/ download
Director Dean Parisot
Cast Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Samara Weaving, Brigette Lundy-paine
Playing air guitar in Development Hell for the best part of a decade, the third Bill & Ted movie clearly faced a dilemma. The duo’s original adventures – released as the ’80s bled into the ’90s – belonged to a moment: the world was Generation X’s playground and freewheeling, good-natured dopiness could rule.
Now the planet is a grimmer place. Could Bill and Ted possibly fit the 21st century? And did we want our slacker gods preserved in all their idiot glory? Or should they grow, evolve, reflect the passage of 30 years? A mature Bill and Ted… wouldn’t that be, like, most egregious, if not altogether bogus?
At first it seems Face The Music has chosen to pickle its heroes exactly as we remember them, a pair of lovable historical curios (the film opens with the Orion Pictures starfield, a potent nostalgia rush in itself ). They’re playing at a wedding, and while their music may have moved on – an avant garde din with bagpipes and a theremin – physically they’re within squinting distance of our memories. There’s actually a weird dissonance in seeing Keanu Reeves embody Ted again, given how his career’s rocketed in the decades since. It’s almost an act of contortion – folding up John Wick and Neo and Johnny Mnemonic to fit himself back into some long-abandoned box. Alex Winter, who’s been rather less visible, has no such problem.
But strange things are afoot in 2020. The eternal man-children are attending marriage therapy, their wives – recast from the earlier films – frustrated by their unbreakable bond of dudeship. And there’s a new generation of Logan and Preston: two daughters, played by Samara Weaving and Brigette Lundy-paine, who brilliantly channel the spirit of their fathers, both in physicality and general whoa!-ness while being very much their own characters. It’s a welcome storytelling choice that they haven’t rebelled against their dads.
Soon Bill and Ted are whisked to the far future, where they’re tasked with saving reality from the complete collapse of time and space. “All we’ve got to do is write the greatest song ever written!” they realise, heading for that trusty fourth-dimensional phone box.
While their daughters help by traversing history to assemble a League of Extraordinary Musos, including Mozart, Hendrix and Louis Armstrong, Bill and Ted opt for the Bootstrap Paradox, attempting to steal the song from their future selves. It’s here the film allows its heroes to truly go off-brand. We meet a succession of ghastly but hilarious older incarnations, from preening rock gods to tattooed and steroidal prison inmates. Their general awfulness is a tough sell, given the indestructible sweetness of the Bill and Ted we know, but it’s
Goes full Steven Moffat in its final act
great fun, and there’s an unexpected emotional kick as the guys confront themselves at the very end of their lives – a moment that plays like an elegy for these Gen X icons and their place in pop culture.
Directed by Dean Parisot, who also gave us Galaxy Quest, the film goes full Steven Moffat in its final act. Twistier even than Tenet, it remains remarkably comprehensible, its quantum shenanigans held together by humour. Yes, the effects are rough in places, betraying a surprisingly modest budget, but the movie has heart to spare, indulging nostalgia while being generous enough to hand a pivotal, late-breaking plot development to the next generation. Meanwhile Reeves and Winter are clearly having a blast, rekindling their chemistry in a way that’s infectious. After 30 years apart they still feel inseparable. In fact, they’re excellent to each other.
Extras Three stupidly brief behind-the-scenes features (previously available online), including a tour of Death’s lair. At around a minute each they feel like trailers for the content we could have had. More rewarding – certainly more substantial – is the film’s Comiccon@home panel (43 minutes). The pandemic keeps it Zoomtastic but it’s an entertaining chat with cast and creators, moderated with authentic fanboy enthusiasm by Kevin Smith, who admits that Bill and Ted are in the DNA of Jay and Silent Bob. It’s testament to Reeves’s decency that despite his star power he’s willing to take a back seat here. Or maybe the guy’s just shy…
While the filmmakers secured permission to use Jimi Hendrix’s likeness, they weren’t allowed to use it in the marketing.